The Ultimates: Against All Enemies (3 page)

"And you're going back this year for the same, is that correct?"

"It is."

"So you have a real interest in making sure that the threats SHIELD is chartered to counter are taken seriously."

Fury felt his temper rising, and told himself not to open his mouth, but somehow he already had. "I don't think Homeland Security is in any position to throw that particular stone, Mr. Secretary." That did it, he thought. Now the knives are out. Garza wasn't looking amused anymore.

"You mind if I pick this up again for a minute, Vince?" asked Ozzie Bright. Altobelli nodded. Bright stood and put both of his hands flat on the table. "It's my opinion, ladies and gentlemen, that security reasons compel us to limit the dispersal of this technology to venues and situations that are strictly controlled and monitored. Its loss to the Chitauri would be a devastating blow." Not nearly as devastating as never having had it in the first place, Fury thought.

"I'll ask you to indulge me in a little historical parallel," Bright went on. "During World War II, hard decisions were made about utilizing certain technologies and acting on the information gained thereby. Had the Allies saved every life and thwarted every minor movement they learned about by cracking the Enigma code, the Nazis would quickly have abandoned Enigma; by sacrificing those necessary lives, the Allies maintained their intelligence superiority over the Nazis long enough for that advantage to prove decisive. Do you understand the analogy, General Fury?"

Fury made his tone as level as he could. "I understand the analogy, Mr. Secretary, but I think circumstances here are different enough to render it invalid."

"Well," Bright said. "With all due respect for your understandable difference in opinion, I suggest that the facts speak for themselves."

And Fury knew he had lost. Maybe not just because of his lapse in temper, but he had lost all the same. 4

Steve was watching Some
Like It Hot
on cable when his cell phone rang. He had to resist the urge to walk over to the phone on the wall in the kitchen. He'd spent twenty-seven years talking on phones tethered to walls, and he was having a hard time getting used to the change. He checked the cell phone's caller ID, saw that it was Nick Fury calling. "General," he said.

"Cap," came Fury's voice. "You home?" This was another thing Steve couldn't get used to. Of course he was home. That's where you were when you talked on the phone.

Only now that wasn't true anymore.

"Yeah," he said.

"Good," Fury said. "I'm downstairs. Let me buy you a beer." On his way out, Steve walked over to the TV and turned it of!" Then he remembered that he'd been sitting next to the remote. Now that's even stranger than the phone, he thought. I never even saw a television before I left for the war; every time I've ever used a
TV
, it's had a remote. And yet I still go to turn them off manually. Walking downstairs, he wondered if the problem was that he just assumed all electronic things had switches. Then he decided that the whole thing wasn't worth worrying about. There were more important problems.

Such as why Nick Fury had come looking for him at ten o'clock on a Tuesday night.

"I'm kind of a morning person, General," Steve said when he came out the front door of his building. "If you're looking for a drinking buddy, I might not measure up."

"I don't even care if you drink," Fury said. They got into Fury's car—his personal car, Steve noticed, not one of the service limos that usually took them around the city. General Nick Fury, director of SHIELD, was driving a green Toyota Corolla. "I saw that look," Fury said. "This is my incognito car."

"So we're incognito?"

"Just don't feel like drawing attention."

"Okay," Steve said. "Where are we going?"

"Bar I picked because it has the same name as a restaurant I like in San Francisco. It's called the Boulevard, up in Greenpoint."

Greenpoint, Steve thought. The name brought to mind Polish butchers. "I used to get pierogies in Greenpoint sometimes."

"You still can. Don't walk around thinking New York's completely different. In some neighborhoods, fifty-eight years isn't that long." They were driving under the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. Fury turned left and doubled back, parking right in front of a bar set in the middle of a block of four-story walkups. Inside, the Boulevard was a woody, comfortable spot. Bar on one side, booths on the other, with a space in the back for a pool table. The back door was open, and Steve could see out into what looked like a small courtyard. Two TVs played the Yankees game. There were six or eight people sitting around, all wearing the costume of a breed Steve had learned was called the hipster. The bartender was a big longhair with tattoos, wearing a black shirt that caught Steve's eye because of the German lettering on it. He gave the shirt a closer look and realized it was a soccer jersey. Deutsche Fussball-Bund.

"For Pete's sake," he said to General Fury. "We go and fight a war so this yahoo can be a soccer fan." Fury shrugged. "Past is past, Cap."

Not to me
, Steve thought.

Fury bought a beer and a ginger ale and the two of them sat in a booth beneath one of the television sets.

"So, General," Steve said. 'You must have brought me out here for a reason."

"I did," Fury said. "I brought you out here because I spent the morning getting my ass chewed by politicians and I wanted to talk to a rational human being."

"Tony's new toy?" Steve asked.

Fury nodded. "Washington's afraid that if we use it too soon, the bad guys will figure out a way around it. Plus I got in the middle of a pissing contest between two Cabinet departments." He shook his head and drank. "Should have known better. Anyway, long story short, they quashed it. Gave me this long rigmarole about how Tony shouldn't be trusted with certain materials, how I couldn't be trusted because I was running SHIELD like some kind of shadow junta, blah blah blah."

"Let me get this straight," Steve said. "They know we have a tool that would work against the enemy, and they're telling us not to use it because if we use it, the enemy might find out about it?"

"That's the upshot. And you'll appreciate this. One of them actually gave me a high and mighty speech about Enigma, how the Allies didn't always act on the information they got after they broke the code because they didn't want to let on that they'd cracked it."

"Is that true?" Steve asked.

Fury just looked at him.

"And good men died because of it," Steve said.

'Yes, they did," Fury said. "But it wasn't necessarily the wrong call. Would more of those good men have died if the Nazis switched to a new code and the war lasted six more months?"

"Wrong question," Steve said vehemently. "You have information, you act on it. You have the enemy in front of you, you take him out."

"I don't disagree," Fury said. "But you and I aren't always the ones who make the call."
Politicians
, Steve thought with disgust. "They're out there, though. We didn't get them all. Washington must know that."

"Washington," Fury said, "knows what it wants to know. And it doesn't want to know this. Well, some of them do. And I had this thought as I was walking out of the meeting, Cap. I thought, you know, SHIELD

could do whatever it wants. But we decide to go through these channels because that's the way things are done in this country, or should be. And then I had another thought, which was that ninety-nine times out of a hundred that might be the best way to do things... but this might be the hundredth time." He killed his beer and tipped the glass at Steve. "And that, soldier, is what is known as a privileged communication."

"Understood, sir." Steve sat and nursed his ginger ale while Fury went to the bar and came back. The jukebox started blaring, and Steve's mood soured further. A year after he'd been thawed, he still didn't get the music.

"So I thought to myself" Fury said when he'd settled in the booth again, "uniforms stick together. And it occurred to me that maybe you needed to have a beer. Or a ginger ale. Whatever." Fury raised his glass.

"The uniform."

"Damn right," Steve said, returning the toast. "The uniform." A cheer went up from a group of three people at the bar. Steve saw that they were looking at the TV

over his head. He turned to see the other
TV
, and watched a Yankee trotting around the bases.

"You look like you just bit into something rotten," Fury said. "Let me guess. Dodgers fan?" The depth of his anger surprised Steve. "Hell yes. That's one of the worst things about coming back. Los Angeles? How could they move to Los Angeles? And the Giants moving, too? And who are these Mets?

That's not baseball."

"Now it is," Fury said with a shrug.

"And this designated hitter rule," Steve went on.

Fury winked his good eye. "Un-American, right?"

"It is," Steve insisted. 'You play the game the way the game is supposed to be played... " He trailed off, and realized that he was really thinking about something else. "Sometimes I think the uniform's all I have," he said. "I turn on the TV... you know, I was just thinking tonight. Before I got thawed out, I'd never seen a television in my life. Now it's on all the time, everywhere. You can see anything."

"Except what's really going on."

"Well. You don't need to see everything. I mean, the average person doesn't."

"You don't think so?"

Steve set down his glass. "No, I don't. That's what we're here for. We're here to keep the boogeymen out from under the bed. It doesn't do any good if we get rid of the boogeyman and then put his picture on the six o'clock news for everyone to get scared of all over again."

Fury was looking at him, and Steve suddenly realized that the general hadn't responded because he was waiting for Steve to figure out the implications of what he'd just said. "No," Steve said. "I don't believe that. I don't believe in all of this mumbo-jumbo about keeping people scared. This is America. We don't do things like that."

'Well," General Fury said, "we try not to, anyway."

That's not an America I recognize, Steve thought. And it's not an America I want to live in. The America I believe in doesn't let political squabbling compromise its security.

And if that's how things really are, then I'm going to do something about it. I've done dirty jobs for this country before, and I'll do it again.

He felt like he was in dangerous territory. You're coming close to going off the reservation, son, he told himself But if what General Fury was telling him was true, America had fallen a long way since Roosevelt had told the country that the only thing it had to fear was fear itself.

Fury was looking at him. "I can see the wheels spinning, Captain Rogers."

"Just thinking all of this over, sir. What do we do?"

"What do we do? We play the game the way the game is supposed to be played." Fury drained the rest of his beer and stood. "Back to running SHIELD. Shadow military governments don't run themselves. Thanks for coming out."

"Any time," Steve said.

Outside, Fury offered him a ride home, but Steve decided he'd rather walk.

"You sure?" Fury was jingling his keys, obviously in a hurry to get somewhere else.

"Yeah," Steve said. The only company he wanted right then was his own thoughts, and his own misgivings, and his own sense that something had to be done.

Fury unlocked the Toyota, but paused before getting in. "Cap," he said. "This country needs people like you, but the people who run it aren't like you."

Steve nodded.

"You need to understand that or else you're going to go off and do something we'll all regret."

"Yes, sir," Steve said. He lifted a hand in a half-hearted wave, and walked off. Maybe it's
because
I understand that, that I might do something we'll all regret, he thought. That night he didn't sleep at all. 5

Status Report

Intelligence gathering suggests a possible technological advance that necessitates an accelerated mission plan. We proceed accordingly.

The impulse to individuality simultaneously retards the progress of
Homo sapiens
(to borrow their unwieldy classification system) as a species and enables startling acts of innovation on the part of individual members of the species. This is one reason why
Homo sapiens
was targeted for ordering. The parallel influences of chaos and reason, however, make humans a particularly difficult case to manage. Under no circumstances should we mistake the actions and rationales of one member of the species for a general tendency on the part of the species as a whole.

A further complication is the observed phenomenon of a member of the species reasoning through a set of circumstances and then acting in a way entirely opposed to the logical conclusion of this reasoning process. Again, this observed phenomenon was one factor in the initiation of the human ordering project; it bears repeating in the current context, especially in view of the influx of new forces unfamiliar with the nature of the human.

The human team known as the suffers from all of the defects in reason that afflict
Homo
sapiens
as a species; yet they have proved a difficult obstacle. We are intensifying our surveillance of all current and former members of this organization, and have reason to believe that this surveillance will enable us to penetrate the organization and remove it as an obstacle.

Progress in nonhuman form assimilation has been particularly successful in furthering this goal. Increased surveillance, and increased density of assimilated assets in place, is ordered in the following locations:

. Location of team member as well as his corporate endeavor,

. Location of team member . Location of team member . Location of headquarters, , previously infiltrated. Full schematics of

are available and will be utilized as part of the human ordering project.

. Location of team member .